"Silverstone is still one of the best circuits"- Lewis Hamilton feels 2022 F1 British GP will prove to be an ideal track for car testing at high-speed corners

Lewis Hamilton believes the Silverstone circuit will prove to be an ideal track for Mercedes to test the W13’s performance in medium and high-speed corners.

After the team seemingly found fixes to the car’s bouncing issues at the 2022 F1 Canadian GP, the Briton hoped that the car would be much more stable heading into his home Grand Prix. Speaking to Autosport ahead of the 2022 F1 British GP, Hamilton said:

“Silverstone is still one of the best circuits, if not the best, in the sense of having all the medium- and high-speed corners, and the high-speed corners are always the most fun to drive... With these cars that we have today, I mean, if you look at Barcelona we had bouncing in the high-speed corners, so it might not be spectacular, but I’m hoping by then we may have fixed it. But we will see.”

Following a strong showing in Montréal two weeks ago, Mercedes are optimistic about their chances for the rest of the season.

The team believes that their performance at Silverstone — a circuit that features an equal number of slow speed, high speed, and very high speed corners — will indicate whether they have managed to fully fix their problems.

With the team reportedly preparing to bring in more upgrades to the track, Lewis Hamilton is hopeful that they will be much closer to the frontrunners, as they did at the 2022 F1 Spanish GP a few races ago. He said:

“We’re better in medium and high-speed corners, probably, than we are in the low-speed corners, but we have bouncing. So, I don’t know how it’s going to be through Copse and all those places. It’ll be interesting for us there. I think for all of us, it is going to be amazing. And we also can follow a little bit closer this year. So hopefully the race will be better.”

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Lewis Hamilton was unlucky with new parts that failed to work as intended: Mercedes engineer

Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin believes Lewis Hamilton was unlucky with new components during the early part of the season as the team was experimenting to find solutions to porpoising. Speaking to Sky Sports following Hamilton’s 2022 F1 Canadian GP podium, Shovlin said:

“We were on the backfoot at the start of the year, we needed to learn, you can’t learn without experimenting on the cars. Lewis was unlucky perhaps with the way that some of those parts landed. Because when we put them on a car, we don’t know which are the good ones, which are the bad ones. Some of what you’re doing at the track is to actually to understand that.”

Hamilton struggled to find confidence in his car during some of the early races and failed to score consistently against teammate George Russell.